For years, we’ve been seeing a decline in applications to study chemistry at university, both here at Lancaster and across the country. The latest UCAS figures show that 4,900 students were accepted to chemistry courses for the 2022/23, a drop in 19% compared to the figures in 2019. Many well-established institutions (such Exeter and Bangor) have recently closed their departments, with many others struggling to recruit sustainable numbers. As the Recruitment, Conversion and Marketing Coordinator for the Chemistry Department – and as a former teacher myself – I wanted to delve into the reasons as to why young people seem to be steering away from a future within chemistry, and see if there was something we could do to encourage more students to see themselves as chemists of the future. Looking through our internal reports, I found that the biggest drop in applications (some 66%) was from students in the POLAR4 Quintiles 1 and 2, which covers young people who are in the most economically-deprived areas with the lowest progression into higher education.

Additionally, I also looked into the Royal Society of Chemistry’s “Chemistry for All” report, which highlighted the key barriers to participation in post-16 chemistry education. These findings suggested that the barriers included the perception that chemistry is too difficult, a lack of relatable role models in the field, and limited awareness of chemistry-related career pathways. I found these misconceptions to be quite interesting and wanted to come up with a way to help these disadvantaged students build their confidence in chemistry, and the STEM fields in general. After taking the findings to the Department and getting their approval to launch a widening participation project, we applied to a grant from the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Community Fund, which we were very luck to receive £5000 of funding from, enabling us to begin work on the “Elements of Success: Building Confidence in Chemistry” programme. The programme took place over the summer of 2025, and invited 40 Year 12 students from schools across the North-West (all in the POLAR4 1 and 2 Quintile areas) to come onto campus and engage with staff and students in the Chemistry Department.

“Elements of Success” was a multi-sessional project – as I’d found repeatedly in research that multi-session projects for this sort of thing were much more effective than a single outreach visit. Multiple sessions over a short period of time would allow the students time to build that much-needed confidence, develop their skills for the future, and give them a greater level of awareness of what higher-level chemistry (and university study in general) was like. The first of our three sessions focussed on developing the students’ practical skills in chemistry, and took the form of lab sessions delivered by our staff in the University, and some talks from student ambassadors to discuss their journeys into chemistry. I was also really keen to get industry involvement in the programme to give the students access to role models that they likely wouldn’t have access to for career guidance and showing them the sorts of paths chemistry can lead to. We were very fortunate to get Victrex (a local polymer manufacturing company) on board to come and help us deliver some of the lab and employability sessions, which really helped the students understand the real-world applications of chemistry and the range of future opportunities it can unlock.

Our second day of activities had our students taking part in a lab investigation, which would become the basis of a research poster that they would be presenting in the third session. I wanted to give the students the opportunity to create a research poster because not only does it give them real-world skills that they would need to go into academia, but it also gave them a sense of ownership of the project, and the opportunity to visually celebrate their work.

Between the second and third session, their teachers would give them the support in creating the poster, which was then delivered in the third session. They delivered their posters in a lecture theatre in front of every member of the Department, and I was so proud of them because it was such a daunting thing for them to do! We then displayed all of the posters out in the Department similar to a research conference, and awarded prizes to the best posters – some industry prizes, sponsored by Victrex and Shimadzu, as well as a Departmentally-sponsored prize, which the staff all voted on. It was really a great thing to get the opportunity to run, and the students seemed to get a lot out of it too. The project was even showcased in the Surface Coatings International Journal and in Chemistry World, which was amazing and incredibly surprising!

Running events such as “Elements of Success” is so important, as not everyone has access to information about higher education, and a lot of people from these more disadvantaged backgrounds don’t feel that going to university is attainable for them. It’s therefore crucial that we show them that it is possible, and not only that, give them relatable role models so that they can have the belief that “actually, I can do this, people like me do go to university and study chemistry”.

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